A couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure of giving a one-day course to PhD students on the topic of Demo-driven innovation. The course was organized as a CUSO (Conférence universitaire de Suisse occidentale).

I got to work with highly motivated students and argue my way through the demo-driven philosophy.

We started from debating what innovation is and what role it plays in both research and engineering. We agreed that innovation is less about discovering the fantastic, as it is about revealing the obvious.

Then we tackled the problem of the process of research. Finding a complete process to such a complex problem is difficult, but focusing on the most basic problem is a doable first step. We concluded that the most important research challenge is not the fight against nature, but against our own entrenched assumptions.

The argumentation went on: To fight our own assumptions we have to expose them and get feedback. But, feedback comes only from interested people. And it is hard to get people interested in a subject that is not their own. The most effective way to capture the attention and later on the imagination is through stories.

Not fairy tales. Stories. Stories make facts valuable. They capture attention and spark imagination. And the more palpable they are, the better their impact is. In other words, we should strive to demo our story. Especially in a field such as computer science, making stories palpable is both accessible and beneficial.

When demos tell stories, magic things happen. On the one hand, the audience gets more involved. On the other hand, the very implementation of the demo provides a tremendous feedback. We are syntactic creatures, and the look of ideas matters a great deal to us.

And no, there is no such thing as an un-demoable topic.